Interior: Swans Likely 1st to Get Bird Flu
Associated Press
2006 May 24
Author John Heilprin
Photo courtesy of Associated Press / J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A deadly bird flu virus will likely slip into the United States through a pretty package: either majestic swans flying across the Bering Strait into Alaska or from smuggled exotic wildlife at one of the nation's ports.

Its detection probably will depend on watching to see if hundreds of birds die at once, Interior Department officials said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press, adding it may not show up at all in 2006.

"From my perspective, I would say swans are the starting point because we found the disease already, or Europe has found them, in swans," said H. Dale Hall, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The first 1,300 tissue samples taken in Alaska from migratory birds that could carry the H5N1 virus are due to arrive later this week at the U.S. Geological Survey laboratory in Madison, Wis. They come from a subsistence hunt by native Alaskans.

Among migrating birds, officials believe the disease will probably be transmitted from an Asian species to a North American one from the Pacific Flyway when both begin arriving in Alaska for the summer to nest. The Pacific flyway - one of four bird highways in the sky over the United States - stretches from Alaska and western Canada through the Western states to Mexico.

"Birds coming up that would fly in that flyway are the ones that would probably most likely mingle with the Australasian birds that have come up and may be carrying" H5N1, Hall said. "We're working as if it could show up this year."

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Bullfrog Linked to Fungus Spread
BBC News
2006 May 24
Rebecca Morelle
Photo courtesy of BBC News

An invasive frog species may be implicated in the spread of a fungus linked to global amphibian decline, research indicates.

Scientists writing in the journal Biology Letters found that non-native North American bullfrog populations routinely carry the chytrid fungus. The deadly fungus has been implicated in many amphibian extinctions.

The scientists suggest the bullfrog may act as a vector because it can carry the fungus without developing disease.

Frog-legs

The North American bullfrog (Rana catesbeiana) is the largest of the North American frogs, growing to 20cm (8in) in length and 0.5kg (1lb) in weight.

The bullfrog was initially introduced to countries around the world to be farmed for frog-legs, and was later imported as a pet or to decorate garden ponds. But it has since proven a scourge to many native frog species, either by competing with or even preying on them.

But this latest study also implicates the frog with the spread of a fungus which causes disease and death in many species of amphibians.

An international team of researchers analysed tissue samples from populations of bullfrogs introduced from their native North American regions into Brazil, Uruguay, UK, France, Italy and Japan, as well other regions of Canada and the US.

They discovered that the frogs in every country apart from Japan carried the chytrid fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis).

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